"in" is a very common word and was not included in your search.

but it was.

[glengara]

A search for "blue widgets in widgetland" brings the message about "in" not being included in the search, however "blue widgets widgetland" results are quite different.
Can anyone see the logic behind saying a word was not included when the results differ?

[Brett_Tabke]

Proximity matching. It knows there is something "missing" when the "in" isn't there and looks for the next closer match.

[taxpod]

This has been discussed previously, a very long time ago. It is just one of those things.

[doc_z]

'in' is replaced by a wild card. Thus blue widgets * widgetland yields the same results.

[EBear]

Yeah, I raised this last year. So a page optimised for "Blue Widgets outside Widgetland" would qualify. What's interesting is how hugely different the two Serps are.

[glengara]

I might understand the logic in a 8-9 word search query, but in a 4 word one it seems a bit....

[rainborick]

I always assumed it was just because it would be silly for any search engine to try to include common words like "if, then, in, out, up, down, the, a, an, of, with, he, she, we, they, it, up, down," etc. in the index. It would not only dramatically increase their storage requirements, it would also hopelessly bog down the search process.

[killroy]

For my own search I have quite a list of stop words (not included in the index). But recently I had a bed clash with results. The search was for Do-It-Yourself, the name of one of the companies in my directory, and a category too.

But all the words are stop words! My system does not include them as wild cards though, so teh search effectively fails.

Currently I'm considering adding some of teh less frequent words back into the main index but it's costly.

These seemingly small issues are hugely complex and I can only say heads up to Google for deadling with them so effectively.

SN